Instructional Session 24
Objective: By the end of class, you will be able to… Beginner: write sentences in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France Intermediate: write connected sentences in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France, using transition words to organize your writing Advanced: write paragraphs in French to give details to inform about the Grand Est region of France, using transition words to organize your writing
Preparation: The Guided Oral Input strategy you will be using today is a Big Book. Big Books are basically a series of pictures about a certain topic, with one sentence per page that follows the same pattern (the “sentence frame”) with different facts for each picture in the book. In the context of the “Process Grid Process,” this Big Book is about the first subtopic. In the example lesson series, the first subtopic is the Grand Est region of France. You can either make a digital Big Book, like the one in the sample lesson, or make a literal big book, as shown in the (blurry) picture below, using big pieces of posterboard paper cut in half and bound together in some fashion, perhaps with a ring clip. On each page, you affix a large picture and write in bold marker, or affix a printout of the sentence in large letters, so that students can easily read the text from their seats. I know from years of reusing my Big Books that the paper versions will last longer if you laminate them before you bind the book. You can hold the book as you teach, or prop it on an easel or perhaps in your chalk tray, and flip the page as you read the sentence on each page and talk to the class about the image on that page. Because you will select images that support the details on each page, you can point to details in the image to scaffold students’ comprehension of the main ideas of the sentence as you read it.
There are many sentence frame patterns to choose from, and some of the “traditional” Project GLAD sentence frames do not sound as harmonious when translated into other languages, so you may want to play
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